Consultancy and research

Innovation Norway, a state-owned company with a focus on promotion and development of Norway, used a previous successful experience with a Facebook app to run a new campaign targeting travellers in the US. This case study demonstrates how the firm managed to boost engagement and add 23,000 fans to its Facebook page, as well as lift website referrals by a massive 238%.

Innovation Norway is a state-owned company that focuses on the promotion and development of Norway.

Innovation Norway already had a large U.S. audience on Facebook, and determined a Facebook app, which leveraged that audience, would best promote the new travel campaign.

Although the heart of the effort was the Facebook app, the marketing team also provided budget dollars to a paid media element in the form of sponsored stories and "like" ads.

The app was a daily contest that ran for 45 days. It featured questions about Norway, along with a strong visual element. Each daily question was posted at 8 a.m. Eastern Time. The overall goal of the user experience was to drive engagement.

With this in mind, app users were provided the correct answer right away. They were also presented with a "learn more about this" link to make the overall experience more educational, provide them with a clear takeaway from the app, and to drive traffic to the Innovation Norway website.

To gain more traction with the users, the marketing team added an incentive in the form of a daily prize

The visual element was seen as very important to the success of the Facebook app. Innovation Norway has spent a lot of effort developing its brand. A major part of that development was rich imagery that represents the destinations and experiences of travelers to Norway.

This focus on imagery helped promote the overall goal of engagement by providing an additional element to the content to encourage users to share that Facebook experience with their social media friends.

To promote the app, the team ran daily posts on the Innovation Norway Facebook page and Twitter, along with articles and banner ads on the Innovation Norway website, E-newsletters and social media ads.

The ads were targeted to 30 million US travelers with Scandinavian interest, targeted toward certain states and age brackets.

Innovation Norway found the daily challenge Facebook app helped to create a very engaged audience. So much that even though the campaign has run its course, the marketing team continues to post on the app’s site. The marketing team has found the audience has continued to grow at a "rapid pace" since the daily challenge effort ended, adding more than 10,000 additional "likes" to the page.

Results

Because the goal of the daily challenge Facebook app was to drive engagement, Innovation Norway did not attempt to track any actual travel tied to the effort.

But, in terms of engagement, this campaign proved successful:
• 195% lift in new Facebook fans (more than 23,000 new fans)

• The number of people "talking about" the page each day increased 1,101% over pre-campaign engagement

The effort also increased traffic to the Innovation Norway U.S. website by 40% year-over-year, along with a 238% lift in referral traffic from Facebook to the website.

As a result, Innovation Norway gained more than 23,000 new Facebook fans and a more than 6,500% lift in daily "likes" of page content. See how it also created a user base that continued to grow even after the promotion had run its course.